Accurate Business Citations. Use a tool like YextorLocalezeto help see where your company’s local listings are found online. Consider using GoogleMapMakerto search for your business and phone number to help you see if there are any duplicate listings. Search for various names of your business. If you already have a listing created, that information is gathered from around the web so it could be incorrect!

Online Reviews. Google looks at reviews as a major factor for ranking on the new carousel design; however more than anything your reviews are for Google users who see your company on a Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

Quality Photos. This point goes back to optimizing your listing, but it’s so important it deserves its own number. When people are searching for local businesses, they want to see photos. Most local accounts including Google+ Local allow you to upload at least 10 pictures. Your goal should try to be to have that many photos uploaded. It’s also important to take photos of your actual building, both inside and out, and even take pictures of your products.

Optimize Your Website. Part of local search is linking to your website as well as what is being said about your site around the web—it’s not just your local listings and pages. Have your contact information and phone number. It’s also important to try and include city or regional keywords wherever possible and write content that is specific to your local area.

So what about Yelp? Yelp is another hub where you can list your business even though it isn’t considered a major search engine, particularly if you’re in the restaurant business.

Why claim your Google Places page? It is important to show the correct information about your business. This affects how your business shows on google maps as well as what people see when they search for your business.

A Google Mobile Friendly Update was launched as a new algorithm in February designed to reward mobile-friendly web pages. The mobile friendly update potentially gives a ranking boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results. The implementation was live on April 21, 2015. This update will impact those searching on mobile smartphone devices only and it will give a ranking boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results only. It did not affect desktop users nor will it have any impact on your desktop rankings.So the question is, how do you know if your site is mobile friendly? There are a few ways but the only way to know if your site is already indexed by Google as mobile friendly is to see if your site has the mobile friendly label in the mobile search results. Using the mobile friendly testing tool will show if you pass the test, but Google may still need some time to update their index to pick up on the fact that your web pages are mobile friendly.

The mobile friendly algorithm is on a page by page basis. So even if only some of your web pages are not mobile friendly, some come benefit from this algorithm.The algorithm is real time. So if you make improvements, Google has to crawl your web pages to determine if they are mobile friendly. It can take few hours to over 72-hours if you do everything right for Google to show your web pages as mobile friendly. Make sure your most important pages are indexed as mobile friendly sooner than later.No, a web page is only mobile friendly or not mobile friendly, you cannot be more or less mobile friendly than another web page. It is a yes or no on being mobile friendly or not.Need help? Google published a document with the top seven mistakes webmasters make when going mobile friendly.

A free web service offered by Google which allows webmasters and site owners to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. Included are tools that Submit and check a Sitemap Check and set the Crawl rate, and view statistics about how Googlebot accesses a particular site Generate and check a robots.txt file.